Language Fluency: English (Required)
Work Shift: 1st shift (United States of America)
Job Grade: 115
Please review the following job description:
We are seeking a Head of Microservices & API Engineering to define and lead the enterprise strategy, architecture, delivery, and operational excellence of the service and API platform that underpins our digital ecosystem. This is a mission-critical executive leadership role that will shape the way our engineering organization builds, scales, secures, and evolves software across domains, geographies, and customer channels.
This role is foundational to achieving engineering velocity, architectural integrity, and long-term technical resilience across the enterprise. As we shift toward a composable, event-driven, and cloud-native operating model, microservices and APIs are our primary levers for decoupling complexity, enabling self-service, enforcing secure-by-design principles, and unlocking platform innovation. The Head of Microservices & API Engineering will own the vision and implementation of the API platform as an internal product—complete with developer tooling, operational instrumentation, governance workflows, and discovery models.
This is not just a platform engineering role—it’s a strategic leadership position with enterprise-wide influence. The successful candidate will collaborate across infrastructure, security, business application teams, and executive stakeholders to ensure that services are scalable, reusable, observable, policy-compliant, and aligned to business capabilities. They will champion a product-driven, contract-first approach to service development, empowering engineering teams to build loosely coupled systems that evolve independently, operate reliably, and are optimized for change.
Equally important is the cultural transformation this role must drive. The incumbent will be responsible for creating a culture of API craftsmanship, documentation excellence, service ownership, and engineering rigor, while supporting onboarding, enablement, and developer productivity through standardized tooling and golden paths.
This leader will bring deep hands-on technical expertise, a modern engineering mindset, and a proven ability to scale complex platforms inside large, federated technology organizations. They will act as both an architectural authority and a builder of teams, platforms, and experiences that accelerate delivery, reduce complexity, and unlock developer creativity across the enterprise.
ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
Following is a summary of the essential functions for this job. Other duties may be performed, both major and minor, which are not mentioned below. Specific activities may change from time to time.
Strategic & Architectural Leadership
- Define and execute the enterprise-wide microservices and API strategy aligned with business product teams, application modernization, and digital transformation goals.
- Architect the internal API platform as a product—supporting discovery, standardization, policy enforcement, telemetry, security, and high availability.
- Establish canonical patterns for service decomposition, bounded context modeling, service contracts, backward compatibility, and versioning governance.
Platform Engineering & Operations
- Lead the engineering and operation of the enterprise service platform—including API gateways, developer portals, service catalogs, and self-service onboarding.
- Implement and manage tools and frameworks such as Kong, Apigee, Istio, Envoy, OpenAPI/Swagger, GraphQL, Postman, and Backstage.
- Design and enforce security standards, including mTLS, OAuth2, OIDC, JWT, token lifecycle management, rate limiting, quota management, and threat protection.
- Build service governance guardrails (policy-as-code, dependency management, API contracts) and integrate into CI/CD pipelines and release processes.
Developer Experience & Enablement
- Create and maintain golden paths and reusable scaffolding/templates for building and operating microservices.
- Deliver centralized API documentation, changelog automation, sandbox environments, and quality gates for internal and external developers.
- Embed observability-by-default: tracing, metrics, structured logging, and distributed context propagation using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana.
- Drive adoption of platform capabilities through education, engagement, roadshows, enablement tooling, and feedback loops.
Organizational Leadership
- Hire, lead, and mentor a multidisciplinary team of engineers, architects, SREs, and product managers.
- Foster a culture of engineering rigor, API craftsmanship, customer obsession, and delivery velocity.
- Partner closely with application, security, and business leaders to scale service adoption and align APIs to customer-facing and internal business value.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:
- Equivalent combination of advanced education and related experience, including 15+ years managing software engineers, 10+ years in relevant business experience, 5+ years managing large teams, and 5+ years with budget responsibilities.
- Ability to translate enterprise strategic planning into software and data management solutions.
- Executive communication skills, including negotiation, facilitation, and presentation experience.
- Deep knowledge of current and emerging application software products and tools.
- Extensive project management experience with large, multi-million dollar projects.
- Strong analytical and architectural skills.
- Ability to manage numerous internal client relationships.
- Knowledge of all phases of the software engineering lifecycle and process improvement models.
Preferred Qualifications:
- 12+ years of progressive experience in software/platform engineering, with 5+ years in senior leadership delivering microservices or API platforms at scale.
- Deep expertise in API management platforms like Apigee, Kong, WSO2, AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management.
- Experience with service mesh technologies such as Istio, Envoy, Linkerd.
- Familiarity with specification and tooling like OpenAPI/Swagger, GraphQL, Postman, Backstage, AsyncAPI.
- Security expertise including OAuth2, OIDC, mTLS, JWT, API key management, WAF, threat modeling.
- Experience with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger.
- Proficiency in languages and frameworks like Java, Go, Node.js, Spring Boot, gRPC, REST/JSON, protobuf.
- Strong understanding of domain-driven design, event-driven architecture, eventual consistency, and distributed systems principles.
- Proven experience building secure, resilient, multi-tenant platforms with high adoption across federated teams.
- Experience driving service governance, documentation standards, lifecycle automation, dependency hygiene.
Other Job Requirements / Working Conditions
- Visual / Audio / Speaking: Able to interpret client information and communicate effectively in person and over the phone.
- Manual Dexterity / Keyboarding: Able to work with standard office equipment.
- Availability: Able to work all scheduled hours, including overtime as needed.
- Travel: Up to 75%.